INFO 213, S2 2015 Page 1 of 3 Assignment 2
Assignment 2 – Implementation
Strategies
Assignment Worth: 10% of final mark
Deadline: Friday 4th September 2015 at 5pm
This assignment is broken into two parts. The first part asks you to start with the point-of-sale (POS)
system that you evaluated in lab 3, and perform a more complete evaluation of the system with
respect to a set of requirements outlined by a hypothetical client. The second part asks you to
perform a more conceptual evaluation and recommendation of two existing POS systems, without
installing and testing them directly, and prepare a request for information to the vendor(s) of these
products.
Each task of this assignment has equal weighting (i.e., each part contributes towards 5% of your
final mark)
Scenario
You work for a local IT consultancy firm, and have been contracted to procure a new point-of-sale
(POS) system for a small retail business (“The Boardroom”) that specialises in selling skateboard
equipment and related paraphernalia. You have been given the following brief:
1. The system must (naturally) allow the business to capture sales transaction information.
2. The system needs to integrate with external POS hardware (e.g., cash registers, EFT-POS
readers, etc.)
3. The system must record product information (e.g., price and category), but does not need to
keep inventory information.
4. The required system will record customer details for repeat customers, but must also allow
for "cash" sales.
5. At the end of each month, the business would like to email "valued" customers to offer
them special deals for the following month. The system would need to provide the data
source of this mail merge, although the mail merge process itself could be managed through
external means (e.g., Microsoft Word mail merge).
6. Any changes to the system to integrate it into the current business’ processes must be
robust to future updates (e.g., must not be overwritten by future bug fixes).
7. Finally, the system should ultimately have a “look” that integrates with The Boardroom's
company branding.
The details of the project strongly suggest the use of an off-the-shelf solution. Your firm has
identified one system that may be suitable, and you have performed a simple, but incomplete,
INFO 213, S2 2015 Page 2 of 3 Assignment 2
evaluation of this system. Your evaluation of the system used a handful of criteria: functional
requirements; data requirements; robustness to updates; configuration; and customisation.
Your firm recognises that it is not doing its job properly by only evaluating a single system for
recommendation to the client. Therefore, you have also been tasked with the job of identifying
alternative systems from which to perform a comparison. Ultimately, you would identify potential
solutions more formally through a request for information (RFI), but to inform that process, you
have been asked to perfor.
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INFO 213, S2 2015 Page 1 of 3 Assignment 2 Assignment 2 – .docx
1. INFO 213, S2 2015 Page 1 of 3 Assignment 2
Assignment 2 – Implementation
Strategies
Assignment Worth: 10% of final mark
Deadline: Friday 4th September 2015 at 5pm
This assignment is broken into two parts. The first part asks you
to start with the point-of-sale (POS)
system that you evaluated in lab 3, and perform a more
complete evaluation of the system with
respect to a set of requirements outlined by a hypothetical
client. The second part asks you to
perform a more conceptual evaluation and recommendation of
two existing POS systems, without
installing and testing them directly, and prepare a request for
information to the vendor(s) of these
products.
Each task of this assignment has equal weighting (i.e., each part
contributes towards 5% of your
final mark)
Scenario
2. You work for a local IT consultancy firm, and have been
contracted to procure a new point-of-sale
(POS) system for a small retail business (“The Boardroom”)
that specialises in selling skateboard
equipment and related paraphernalia. You have been given the
following brief:
1. The system must (naturally) allow the business to capture
sales transaction information.
2. The system needs to integrate with external POS hardware
(e.g., cash registers, EFT-POS
readers, etc.)
3. The system must record product information (e.g., price and
category), but does not need to
keep inventory information.
4. The required system will record customer details for repeat
customers, but must also allow
for "cash" sales.
5. At the end of each month, the business would like to email
"valued" customers to offer
them special deals for the following month. The system would
need to provide the data
source of this mail merge, although the mail merge process
itself could be managed through
3. external means (e.g., Microsoft Word mail merge).
6. Any changes to the system to integrate it into the current
business’ processes must be
robust to future updates (e.g., must not be overwritten by future
bug fixes).
7. Finally, the system should ultimately have a “look” that
integrates with The Boardroom's
company branding.
The details of the project strongly suggest the use of an off-the-
shelf solution. Your firm has
identified one system that may be suitable, and you have
performed a simple, but incomplete,
INFO 213, S2 2015 Page 2 of 3 Assignment 2
evaluation of this system. Your evaluation of the system used a
handful of criteria: functional
requirements; data requirements; robustness to updates;
configuration; and customisation.
Your firm recognises that it is not doing its job properly by only
evaluating a single system for
recommendation to the client. Therefore, you have also been
tasked with the job of identifying
alternative systems from which to perform a comparison.
4. Ultimately, you would identify potential
solutions more formally through a request for information
(RFI), but to inform that process, you
have been asked to perform some pilot research into available
POS systems.
Task 1: Direct Evaluation of a POS System
If not already done, perform an evaluation of the POS system
that was introduced in lab 3 of this
class. Write a brief summary of that evaluation (length: ~750
words), in which you must also address
the following:
discussed in lab 3. What does
each criteria add to the evaluation (i.e., why is it important to
include it in the evaluation)?
an adequate evaluation of the
POS system (aside from that garnered from the practical
interrogation of the software)?
From where would you source this information, and how would
you ascertain its quality?
well-supported recommendation
of the suitability of the proposed POS system.
5. Task 2: Indirect Evaluation of POS Systems
Your client has asked you to provide a list of alternatives to the
proposed “lab 3” POS system, so that
a more complete evaluation may take place. Doing so will help
give confidence towards selecting the
most appropriate solution. Therefore, write a short report (~500
words), that covers the following:
-the-shelf solutions to address the needs of
the client, and provides a brief
summary of each product, their vendors, and other pertinent
information (e.g., licensing
details)
filling the
requirements of the client, and
provides evidence (where appropriate) to demonstrate that
requirements are fulfilled by
these products (or, conversely, where it is explicitly known that
these products do not meet
the requirements).
Finally, prepare a short (approx. 10 questions) request for
information to send to the vendor(s) of
your chosen products so that a more informed choice may be
performed later on.
6. INFO 213, S2 2015 Page 3 of 3 Assignment 2
Deliverables
A single document is required for this assignment. You will
submit your assignment through
Blackboard before the submission deadline – no late
submissions, paper submissions or submissions
via email will be accepted without prior approval. The
document should be structured in two parts,
and each part should clearly identify the tasks that it is
addressing.
All work must be submitted with your name and student id at
the top of every page.
A high level of presentation and professionalism is expected
from all submissions. Submissions
with excessive grammatical and presentation issues will be
returned to students unmarked (i.e., a
zero mark will be awarded).
You will need to reference other sources of evidence as part of
your writing. So long as the format is
consistent throughout the document, and contains all the
relevant information, you are free to
7. choose any referencing system.
Feedback and Plagiarism
An assignment marking schedule will be released closer to the
deadline for the assignment to
provide an indication of how your work will be assessed.
General feedback will be discussed in
classes; you may request more detailed feedback if necessary
once this has been released.
You are welcome (in fact, encouraged) to ask questions
pertaining to the completion of the
assignment. However, we cannot provide proof-reading and
comments on work before the
submission deadline.
Finally, you are encouraged to submit your work through
SafeAssign prior to your final submission.
In line with generally-accepted practise in the School of
Business, we will use SafeAssign to analyse
all work submitted for this assignment. Remember, all work
submitted by you must be your own.
https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/sits/blackboard/safe-assign-3/
https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/sits/blackboard/safe-assign-3/
INFO 213: Lab 3 Worksheet
8. The goal of this lab is to demonstrate the process by which an
existing “off the shelf” solution is
tailored to fit a new business need. In this lab, you will take an
existing solution (very similar to that
developed in BSNS 106) and apply several changes to it so that
it is suitable for use by another
business – The Boardroom (a business that specialises in selling
skateboard and related gear).
The requirements and language used by The Boardroom are
slightly different to that of the study in
BSNS 106 (Jim Bunny’s). Once you download the required files
for today’s lab, you should familiarise
yourself with the changes, and design appropriate solutions to
accommodate them.
Task 1: Project Setup and Configuration
Once you have downloaded the files form Blackboard, open the
Access ACCDE file – this is a
“compiled” version of an Access project that cannot be
extensively modified. Open each of the
components presented in the main menu, and notice that they
present a generic interface. Now,
press the F11 key, open up the Parameters table, and begin the
configuration process to make the
project fit the current business’ needs.
9. Note: Once you have performed the configuration, you will need
to close down and reopen the
project to observe the complete changes.
Before continuing, consider the following: the configurations
required to present the domain-
specific behaviour are contained within the application itself.
What will happen to these
configurations should an updated version of the application be
provided to the user? What would be
one way of easily managing this?
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Task 2: Data Entry and Customisation
Now that the system is “ready” to use, it is time to test that the
required data will sufficiently
10. managed by the system. Using the provided spreadsheet, insert
the test records to test for
acceptable meeting of data requirements. Note that you may
have to “massage” the data to get it
into the system.
Note any changes that you required below:
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How did you manage the insertion of cash sales?
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11. _____________________________________________________
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At this point, you should have the required data inserted into
the system. Re-inspect each system
component to see that behaviour is as expected.
Mail Merge
Finally, you need to somehow implement the missing
functionality of a “valued customers” mailer –
the business wishes to thank customers that have made 3 or
more purchases in the previous month
with an offer of 25% their next purchase. There are three
obvious implementation choices:
report to perform the merge;
spreadsheet, link in data, then create a mail merge in
Word.
For each of these approaches, briefly discuss a strength and
weakness of its use
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